Chapter 57 - More of Kenai and Denali
August 12, 2000
7/13 - 7/20 We're still in Anchorage, by ourselves again, and reverting to our lazy habits. The week was spent relaxing and catching up on routine tasks. It's been heavily overcast and occasionally raining for most of the week. We're told that the overcast skies are the normal state of affairs here, particularly in July and August, but that we're having an unusually rainy period.
RVers Linda and Steve Pederson, from Oregon, stopped by for a visit, with their cute toy poodle. We'd been aware that they were in Alaska and had exchanged Email notes, but this was the first chance to meet in person. On another occasion, Mike Drury stopped by for a short visit and told us about several things to do on Homer Spit and along the Parks Highway. He lives in North Pole (near Fairbanks) and is one of the many people who have followed our travels on the Internet without our ever knowing it. One of the pleasures of this lifestyle is that occasionally, people like Linda, Steve, and Mike will pop up and introduce themselves. It is particularly nice to have input from local people in the areas we travel through, enabling us to find things to see and do that are not described in the standard tourist literature.
7/21 We picked up Helen's niece Linda and her husband Brian at the airport in early evening. It's still raining.
7/22 Linda of course wants to see everything in Alaska in a week, so we packed up and got an early start north. The first stop was at the Iditarod Sled Dog Race Headquarters and Museum in Wasilla. The museum is small, but packed with information about dog sledding and about the history of the race. We watched a video about the race and looked at the portraits of sled dogs lining the hallways. This seems to be a Reddington family operation. Joe Reddington Sr. started the Idiatod Sled Dog Race tradition 30 years ago, and it's now a big deal, with national television coverage and over 100 entrants. We met Joe Reddington Jr. during a sled dog demonstration at the museum, and he said that he and two of his kids would be in next year's race.
Linda & Brian found the 5 minute dogsled ride (on a modern rubber-tired cart, not a sled), pulled by eight dogs, faster than they expected. These dogs show their breeding - they absolutely love to run and to pull the sled. While waiting, they whined and tugged and barked, clearly anxious to get underway. When the sled brake was released, they were off running instantly. Several dogs were being trained, so that dogs were being added to or removed from the team between trips. Dogs who were removed from the team and tied to a nearby tree acted as though they were being punished by being banished from all the fun. Dogs being brought into the team were clearly excited. The dogsled puppies were adorable. They accepted being handled and cuddled, but were much too energetic to hold still for long. Most were for sale for about $300 each.
Next stop, Talkeetna, for flightseeing with Doug Geeting's Air Service - one of several companies offering flightseeing from the Talkeetna airport. The 1 1/4-hour trip, in a five-seat Cessna 185, flew over some spectacular glacier scenery and landed in Don Sheldon Amphitheater, a huge glacial basin on the south side of Denali. Sheldon's original cabin (and outhouse) is visible, high on rock outcropping in the middle of the huge ice-filled amphitheater named after him. (He was a bush pilot pioneer in this area). Small lakes on the glaciers this time of year are a brilliant turquoise color from the air. The surface is getting to be soft, rough, corn snow and our pilot said planes wouldn't be able to land on it in another week or so.
Isolated homes in the forest are visible from the plane - far from the nearest road - not even a trail visible. Alaska seems to have many semi-hermits. We also saw a few large rectangular cleared fields - dating back to the homestead era, when unsuspecting people from the lower 48 were lured up here by the promise of 160 acres of free land, and had to clear the land and live on it to gain title. Few of them stayed. Down around Palmer and Wasilla, farming was marginally successful and continues today. But up here, it's a hopeless endeavor.
There was no hope of seeing Mt. McKinley. We got brief patches of sunshine during the approach, but the cloud ceiling was probably at around 8000 feet or less (we only flew to about 6000 ft.) And even when the surrounding country is clear, McKinley tends to make its own clouds. We were told that this was actually a pretty good flying day by local standards. It was indeed a scenic and enjoyable flight, giving us expansive views of vast glaciers winding through the high rocky peaks in stark, bare, canyons.
On the return trip, we flew up over a high ridge and down the Coffee River valley - a green valley where we hoped for bear sightings. Saw one moose, no bear. Brian was constantly juggling a rented video camera and his 35mm camera, trying to capture every scene in both formats.
After the flight, we drove to the Talkeetna Lodge for lunch and the view. The main lodge sits on a bluff with a clear view west across the valley to McKinley. It's a new building - a spectacular contemporary adaptation of traditional log construction. A soaring three-story-high roof line shelters a vast glass wall which extends down one side of the main lounge and through the dining room, facing the mountains. We still couldn't see McKinley, but the nearer and lower portions of the Alaska Range were impressive. A fire was crackling comfortably in a huge fieldstone fireplace in the middle of the lounge, surrounded by comfortable chairs. The public areas of the Lodge are hung with impressive nature photography. The food was good too! This would be a wonderful place to spend a few days.
Back in the truck, we drove to Denali National Park, stopping at the Visitor's Center to pick up our reserved shuttle tickets, see the orientation film, and browse the gift shop before continuing on to Denali RV Park where we had a campsite reserved (the National Park campgrounds were, of course, full). In late evening, we were treated to one of the most spectacular sunsets of our lives. We took a lot of photos, and even the photos are spectacular - almost half the sky covered with fluffy clouds in bright red/orange/yellow tints.
7/23 In Denali National Park, Helen, Linda, and Brian did the 11-hour shuttle to Wonder Lake. Wildlife consisted of one red fox laying on the yellow line of the road at Savage River, a few caribou in the hills, some Dall sheep, another fox, but not much else until after the Eielson Visitor's Center where we saw a mother grizzly bear and two-year-old cub laying on a caribou carcass, with the wolf that had killed the caribou circling around on the chance it could get the carcass back. Wonder Lake, at the end of the shuttle trip, was a mosquito haven, and with the rain and limited visibility, a disappointment. On the return trip, that same carcass was owned by a different mother grizzly with twin cubs. The previous mother and cub nearby were making bluff charges trying to regain ownership. We saw one physical encounter between the sows. Counting the cubs, there were five grizzlies in view in the binoculars field of vision at one time!
Because of the heavy overcast and occasional rain Dave canceled plans to do a long mountain hike. He changed the oil in the truck, took a short hike up Bison Gulch, caught up on paperwork, and took a nap.
Dave hooked up the trailer and moved down to the Visitor's Center parking lot, ready to hit the road when the rest of the crew got back from the shuttle trip at 4:30. We didn't actually get on the road until nearly 6 PM, so we Drove only as far as Wasilla, spending the night in a parking lot of a closed-down ex-Wal-Mart store just north of the junction of the Glenn & Parks Highways.
7/24 It is difficult to determine just when the tidal bore will sweep up Turnagin arm. No one seems to know. Even The Milepost is misleading. But we lucked out and caught it again, stopping to watch it pass, then driving a few miles up the shore to stop and watch it pass again.
Arrived in Seward shortly after noon, camping in about the same place as last time, on the waterfront. Helen, Linda, and Brian went to the Sealife Center after lunch, then did some shopping and ice-cream-cone eating later. (Fireweed Honey and Birch Walnut flavors - yum!) Later, Dave, Linda, and Brian drove to Exit Glacier to hike the Harding Icefield Trail - a 7-mile trail roughly paralleling Exit Glacier, up to the huge icefield from which the glacier (and 35 other named glaciers) flows. We didn't get started walking until 7:00 PM, much later than originally intended, but were saved by the 18-hours-of daylight, even now, a full month after the summer solstice.
This hike is long, steep, and strenuous, but offers fabulous views of the glacier and the Icefield. Hikers coming down the trail as we went up warned us that a sow grizzly and cub were near the trail just ahead of us. We didn't see them, but think we smelled them - a strong "wet dog" odor along several hundred yards of trail. We got back down to the car at 12:30 AM - still with enough light to find our way along the trail.
7/25 A 9 1/2-hour boat trip, in full sun (Hallelujah!). We took the Kenai Explorer to The Chiswell Islands and Northwestern Glacier. Impressive glacier face, but no longer much tidewater contact. Not much ice in the bay — the wind is sweeping it out — and it's all small chunks, broken up as it cascades down from high up on the glacial face. The crack of sound as the glacier lets go of a chunk is almost like the sound of thunder, with extended slowly-dying echoes from the Fjord walls. We envied a group of kayakers who were picking their way through the ice much closer to the glacier face. We saw plenty of examples of the usual sea life (orcas, humpbacks, sea otters, stellar sea lions, puffins, murres, bald eagles, etc) and glorious scenery on this sunny day, using up lots of rolls of film.
We walked to the municipal dock where sport fishermen posed with the day's catch. One group had a 290-lb Halibut, which we later saw pictured in the Anchorage newspaper as a contest winner. The outer portion of the dock is lined with fish cleaning stations, where professionals will clean the day's catch, after which the filets (often 50 pounds or more per individual) may be packaged in dry ice and shipped to the fisherman's home. The fish guts and carcasses are thrown over the side of the dock into the bay, where hordes of birds fight noisily over anything on the surface, while crabs and other scavengers quickly clean up whatever sinks to the bottom. Two harbor seals were hanging around too.
Dinner at Ray's - another excellent meal. Linda and Brian both praised the crab-stuffed halibut "special of the day"; Dave enjoyed the ciopinno; Helen enjoyed the seafood linguine. There was no cruise ship in harbor, and no wait for a table.
A self-loading freighter is anchored just offshore from our campsite. Fish processing boats are periodically coming alongside to transfer crates of frozen fish into the holds of the freighter. These processing boats circulate among the fishing boats, sometimes far out to sea, picking up the catch and immediately turning it into frozen filets, allowing the fishing boats to stay out much longer before making the long trip back to harbor. Other "company boats" pick up fish from the fishing boats and bring it to one of the several processing plants on shore around the harbor. We watched a huge flexible vacuum hose sucking fish from out of the hold of one of these boats into the factory.
7/26 Linda and Brian and Helen went back to Exit Glacier to read the interpretive signs and hike the smaller loop trails, then we hooked up and headed along the Sterling Highway toward Homer. Once we were out of the mountains east of Cooper Landing, the views were not exciting, although it was interesting to see rows of fishermen lining the creeks by the road. After the road reached the coast and turned south there were three or four pullouts with vistas of the several 10,000' volcanoes across Cook Inlet - part of the Pacific "Ring of Fire".
Brian finally got to see Moose along the Sterling Highway - a mother with twin calves were munching in a swampy meadow close along the highway and allowed us to photograph for five minutes or so from inside our vehicle.
On a previous trip with Linda, we spent most of a day in the truck talking about the Myers-Briggs personality types. On this trip, Linda had brought "The Essential Enneagram", by David N. Daniels and Virginia A. Price, describing a rather different personality categorization methodology, and we again tried to fit each member of our families into their appropriate niche in this new structure during the drive to Homer.
Anchor Point is the western-most point (that can be reached by highway) of North America. The image is somewhat dulled by the knowledge that the Aleutian chain of islands stretch for another 1700 miles west of us — far enough to make Alaska both the easternmost and westernmost state (the last islands of the Aleutian chain are on the other side of the International Date Line - one conventional measure of where "East" meets "West".)
Just about three years ago, early in our wanderings, we also stood at Cape Spear, the easternmost point of North America. This also is stretching a point, since this is the East Coast of Newfoundland, which is indeed on the North American Plate, but is an all day ferry ride from the rest of the continent.
The Sterling highway is high on a bluff for most of the way along the coast, and as it nears Homer Spit, a large pullout has great views of the spit, the bay, and the snowy mountains beyond. We could see a few empty slots in the beachfront RV parking, and, when we finally drove out the spit, managed to find a great spot overlooking the beautiful blue water. Excellent dinner of Halibut with artichoke-crab sauce at the Chart House at Land's End on the tip of the spit. Superb desserts, too! Our table was in front of a window looking southeast across Kachemak Bay to the Kenai Mountains, with several glaciers visible.
7/27 Brian and Linda took the ferry to Seldovia, where they saw a bit of the Russian influence on the area, then to Gull Island. Helen browsed a few gift shops. Dave took an early walk out on the tidal flats behind the trailer at low tide. The intertidal ecology isn't as visibly diverse as I'm used to seeing further south, but on close inspection is still quite interesting. Compact little 1" diameter mud-colored circles, barely visible on the mud, turn out to be anemones, waving tentacles several inches long where I find them still immersed in pools. Small deep-blue mussels are half-exposed in the mud and sand, stuck to anything solid. The rocks are barnacle-encrusted. I see a few small dead crabs, but the living ones are well-hidden. Several places along the coast a few miles north of here are famous for large (up to 5") razor clams, but we're told they live a bit further out, in sand that's exposed only at "negative" tides near the full moon or new moon. Today's low tide isn't that low, and I don't have a shovel anyway.
At the outer extreme of the exposed flats, a pair of bald eagles sit quietly on the sand, glaring at me as I invade their space but not moving a muscle. Finally, when I'm within about 50 feet, they lazily unfurl those huge wings, give a couple of slow flaps, and silently disappear out over the water. These 10-to-14 pound birds have enough excess wing area so that they can lift a fish up to half their own weight and fly back to their nest with it. Their talons are fully up to the task of securely carrying a five-pound fish. I walked to where they were standing and see that their footprints are nearly the same span as my own (rather large) hand.
Mike Drury told us the Salty Dog Saloon was great local color, but we didn't get inside — just not enough time.
The Mariner's Memorial is a monument of quite a different kind. Standing near the end of Homer Spit, looking out the mouth of Kachemak Bay, this simple structure contains a long list of names of the local people lost at sea. Each name includes the name of the vessel on which they were lost - mostly commercial fishing boats, with a sprinkling of other types, including a couple of canoes. Relative to the small size of the community, it's a startlingly long list. I sat there for a few minutes, staring out to sea and contemplating the rugged and dangerous life led by the fishermen, trying to make a living by going far offshore in the old, patched-together, inadequately maintained boats we see at the harbor docks.
7/28 It couldn't last, of course - 4 brilliant sunny days in a row. Clouds were gathering as we left Homer at mid-day. Rain began soon after, as we drove toward Anchorage. Clouds were dense and dark all the way, with the precipitation varying from a slow drizzle to occasional hard rain. We've been over this road before, and the familiarity and the rain joined to convince us that it wasn't a day for sightseeing. We kept driving steadily, except for long waits at the construction sites, arriving back in Anchorage at around 6 P.M. We relaxed a bit, and then Dave and Brian drove to the airport, rented a car, and met our daughter Leata at 9:50 P.M. (2 A.M. her time). Leata and Brian headed immediately to the motel with the rental, and Dave settled down to wait another two hours for our son Dan to arrive at 12:31 A.M.
For the two nights that the six of us overlap, we found a combination Motel and RV Park (Hillside on Gambel) in central Anchorage, where Dan and Leata each have a motel room while Brian and Linda continue to stay with us in the trailer.
7/29 Linda, Brian, and Leata are off early for the downtown tourist scene - shopping, museums, etc. Dan slept in, and then went with Dave to buy raingear. We all met back at the trailer for lunch, and then the four kids headed out to do the Native Heritage Center and other tourist stuff. The kids ate out somewhere; we ate at the trailer.
7/30 In the morning, the kids took the rental car for more sightseeing, while we packed up the trailer. We all met at a pancake house for brunch. Linda and Brian drove the car to the airport to catch their early afternoon flight, while the rest of us headed north toward Denali.
We again stopped at the Iditarod Race Headquarters and Sled Dog Museum. Leata fell in love with one of the sled dog puppies that were for sale. Helen, Dan, and Leata took a dog "sled" ride while Dave got a catnap.
Continued driving, to Talkeetna, arriving about 5 PM. The skies were showing fairly high clouds and a lot of blue, so we immediately went into the flightseeing office and asked about flying tonight instead of waiting for our morning reservation. The lady in the office agreed that we should grab the good weather while we had the chance, and started making phone calls to locate the on-duty pilot. The previous flight had been a young couple and two friends. He proposed to her in the plane, up near Mt. McKinley somewhere, and after landing, they all headed off to the local bar to celebrate (including the pilot, who was no longer in condition to fly). The other pilot was in the air, and by the time he landed, almost an hour later, the weather over the mountain had deteriorated.
So we settled in for the night, with the trailer parked out behind Doug Geeting Aviation, adjacent to the apron where the planes are parked. The airport shuts down at dusk, and we expected a quiet night. Unfortunately, it was also a few hundred feet from the busy Seward-Fairbanks railroad, and each train whistled a vigorous warning at the nearby road crossing. Leata has chosen to pitch our tent rather than sleep in the somewhat cramped bed into which our dinette converts.
It was interesting to hang around this bushplane airport watching the activity. Small planes were in various stages of disassembly and repair, frequently being pushed in and out of hangers. The airstrip is busy - with planes taking off or landing every few minutes. The mountain landings are usually on snow, and many of the planes have aluminum skis which can be hydraulically lowered to a position just under the main wheels, with the wheels resting on the surface of the ski. The tail has a small ski fixed in position with the wheel extending a couple of inches down through a hole in the ski. Numerous pairs of floats are sitting around the edges of the parking areas, and some of the planes can be quickly converted from wheels and skis to floats.
The bush plane serves many needs up here - flying owners and renters to their remote cabins, backpackers, hunters, and other campers to various locations, ferrying loads of lumber and supplies, etc. During the spring climbing season (April to early June), many planes are involved in ferrying approximately 1000 climbers and their mountains of gear and supplies to and from the base camp at the 9000 foot level of Mt. McKinley. We're told that during this season, there are 200 to 300 people on the mountain on a typical day.
7/31 The weather was marginal for our morning flightseeing, but we went anyway. The weather was changing so rapidly that the pilot decided not to land, telling us that there was a significant probability that if we landed, the visibility would drop, and we'd be there for a day or more. The misty scenery was still good as we wound through twisty canyons, banking tightly against sheer rock cliffs in the narrow clear zone between the cloud layer thrusting down from above and the glaciers below.
Black and white film would have been adequate - everything was shades of grey - grey clouds and fog, the wet rock beside us appearing jet-black, and the glaciers below in streaks of various shades from brilliant white to dark grey (due to rocks and dust trapped in the ice)
We again lunched at Talkeetna Lodge with slightly better views of Mt McKinley than last time. Drove on to Denali RV Park, dropped the trailer, and had enough time to go to the Visitors Center at the national park and then do the 15-mile drive into the park. Saw a moose and a caribou on that drive.
8/1 Helen and Leata were up early for the 5:15am shuttle into the national park. Dan had been planning to go, but was coming down with a cold and decided to sleep. We have been taking the earliest shuttle on the assumption that the best wildlife sightings were early in the morning. But the driver said the animals have no need to sleep at night, as it isn't very dark, so their sleep/wake periods happen any time. The bus drivers share information about animal sightings, but the first shuttle of the day doesn't have any previous bus to tell it where to look, and sightings may be missed. So the earliest may not be the best here, but it was good, anyway. We saw bear, moose, two foxes, Dall sheep, and assorted birds.
Few of the visitors to the National Park get to see Mt Denali (we've heard estimates from 10% to 25%). The clouds obscure it for the rest. On my fourth visit, I got to see 99% of the mountain. One small cloud hovered over the very tip, but the rest was strikingly white against blue sky. The photos we took of the mountain reflected in Wonder Lake are indeed beautiful.
Dave and Dan packed up the trailer and moved down to the Visitor's Center parking lot in time to pick up Helen and Leata when they arrived back from the shuttle trip. We drove to Wasila, stopping for the night at Green Ridge Camper Park, a bit south of Wasila. We could have parked for free across the street in the parking lot at the empty Wal-Mart building. But the broad expanse of green grass at the RV Park looked much more inviting - particularly for Leata, who didn't relish pitching her tent on an asphalt parking lot.
8/2 Another rainy day for the rest of our drive to Seward. I just checked the long-term weather statistics for Anchorage and found that there is an average of 3 sunny days in August! The clouds did lift enough to allow Dan and Leata to see most of the mountains as we drove. We weren't at the right time to see the tidal bore on Turnagain Arm, and the overcast skies didn't lend themselves to photography, so we stopped only a few times, getting to Seward's waterfront city-operated RV Park around 1 PM. We were fortunate to find an empty site with water and electric hookups and an excellent view across Resurrection Bay to the mountains (there are very few hookup sites and they are *always* full — no reservations accepted). After paying $15 for the water/electric site, we were surprised the next day to find a note ties to Leata's tent, telling us we had to pay a separate camping fee for the tent - another $6! These sites are definitely not a bargain.
Dave and Leata had planned to do the long, strenuous hike up from the Exit Glacier area to an overlook of the Harding Ice Field in the afternoon and early evening. The rain, the limited visibility, (and knowing that the trail would be an unpleasant mess of mud and wet slippery rocks) made us postpone the hike until Friday morning. So Helen went to the Sea Life Center with Dan and Leata, followed by gift shops and ice cream cones (Fireweed and Birch Walnut again).
8/3 We all did the 9 1/2-hour Kenai Fjords boat tour to Northwestern Glacier. It was an interesting and successful day in spite of fog, low clouds, and almost continuous drizzle. There was a big storm yesterday, with high winds for a full day, and we were warned at the dock that the trip might be shortened if the sea conditions were too rough when we got out of Resurrection Bay and into open water. As it turned out, the big swells coming in from the open Pacific were not much of a problem. The boat rode the long gentle waves smoothly, and only a few passengers were seasick. The four of us are quite resistant to seasickness and had no problems. Most of the places we stopped to look at wildlife were somewhat sheltered from the big ocean swells.
The kids saw plenty of humpback whales, orcas, stellar sea lions, sea otters, and got a quick glimpse of a shy harbor seal, none of which they'd previously seen in the wild. The birds among the Chiswell Islands were just at thick as last time - whole cliff sides covered with murres, puffins, gulls, etc. The ice was thick in portions of Northwestern Fjord, and the Captain had to zig-zag violently to avoid the bigger chunks, occasionally slowing to a crawl and pushing through densely packed fields of smaller chunks. This, together with the lowering clouds and the cold temperatures contributed to the remote Arctic feeling as we approached the glacier face. At the face (actually, a safe 1/4 mile out from the face), the captain shut down the boat's engines and generator and we sat quietly, watching and listening to the occasional cascades of ice down the steep face. This glacier tends to shed much of its ice hundreds of feet up. The chunks of ice then tumble down the face, breaking up and stimulating more ice to break off. By the time this ice gets to the water, most of it is in small pieces. So we didn't see any big icebergs. The biggest chunks were smaller than our boat, and few were this big.
The stereophonic symphony of sound is remarkable, unique to glacial fjords. Dozens of big and small streams drain the hundreds of square miles of ice and snowfields, invisible behind the cliffs several thousand feet above us. The streams tumble noisily down the cliffs all around us, visible (and audible) for at least 1000 vertical feet. Waves rub the ice flows together, creating a complex constantly varying background sound. Gusts of dense wintry wind, falling from the icefields high above, stir the ice around us adding yet another timbre to the symphony. Gulls swoop all around the boat, adding their distinctive voice. The ongoing blend of quiet sounds is occasionally augmented by a big ice fall - a crackle followed by huge booming sounds that can last for several seconds, prolonged by reverberating echoes from the cliffs and the rushing sounds of ice sliding down the cliffs. Once in a while, the strong tidal current drives a chunk of ice up against our boat hull, with a distinctive resonant "thunk".
The scene is panoramic, and I'm getting a sore neck, constantly swiveling my head left to right and up and down to take it all in. It's hopeless to capture this on film - we tried last time, and our widest-angle lens captures only tiny vignettes of the whole.
Helen apparently has caught whatever bug was bothering Dan a few days ago, and by late evening was feeling quite sick. It's nice that this waited until after the boat trip.
8/4 None of us felt like a strenuous hike, so we slept in. Helen stayed home, now with a bad cold, and Dave, Leata, and Dan drove to Exit Glacier to hike the short trails to the glacier overlook and to the face of the glacier - perhaps a mile overall. Dan and Leata hadn't been up close to a glacier since they were small children.
As we were packing up to leave our Seward campsite, one person after another stopped by to ask if we were leaving and if they could have the site. How do we answer this question? Perhaps "We're not quite sure when we're pulling out, but when we do leave, those of you that are standing here waiting can fight over it".
Don Robertson also showed up, having recognized our rig as he drove by. He and Rita are camped at the other end of this huge and spread-out campground. We talked for a few minutes, but with Helen sick and me packing up to drive to Anchorage, it wasn't practical to talk for long. We'll keep watching for another opportunity to get together.
The drive back to Anchorage was over a now-very-familiar highway, still under construction for several miles. We got back in time to settle in at Anchorage RV Park and relax for a while, before taking Dan and Leata to the airport.
8/7 We'll call this "The Lost Weekend". Helen's cold is still bad and Dave's is getting worse, so we didn't leave the trailer - sleeping a lot, reading, and doing the mindless things one does to kill time while feeling miserable. Helen is learning a new kind of Indian weaving. Dave did a too-long-neglected file backup on both computers.
8/8 We finally crossed paths with Dave Krieg and Ann Kiehl again. We got acquainted with them in too-brief encounters in Mexico, and have been exchanging itineraries by Email ever since. They are camped less than a mile from us, and we got together for conversation over a long pleasant dinner this evening. We took them to Aladdin's, and again had excellent food and unusually competent service.
8/9 We had intended to leave Anchorage this morning, but then realized that we probably wouldn't be back and that there were several more things we wanted to do here. So we stayed another day and played tourist.
The Alaska Public Lands Information Center is far more interesting than its bureaucratic name suggests. It is indeed a comprehensive information center - with a large collection of books about Alaska for sale, free brochures about almost any of the Federal and State Parks in Alaska, and people from various agencies available to answer questions. But it's also a museum and Visitor's Center, with exhibits illustrating the characteristics of each of the major park areas. Many of the exhibits were interactive and oriented toward children, and the place was swarming with kids, most of whom were enjoying themselves as well as learning something.
Helen had been at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art earlier but saw only part of it, and I hadn't been there at all, so we went today. The Alaska art collection is marvelous — uniformly high quality and covering the entire span of time from early Russian Explorations to the present. I (Dave) discovered a whole room full of (mostly) landscapes by Sidney Lawrence, an artist previously unknown to me, who now has a chance of displacing Bierstadt to become my favorite landscape artist. Lawrence trained in Europe but spent much of his later life in Alaska. Helen and I both, independently, selected a relatively small painting of a little mirror-smooth mountain lake as our favorite among this artist's work, from among a whole room full of much more dramatic scenes.
An extensive special exhibition traces the history of Russian scientific exploration of Alaska. It's very well done, effectively presenting an historical period relatively unknown to most Americans. The perimeter of the Atrium held a wonderful collection of large-format nature photographs.
The second floor of the museum is one huge gallery devoted to the history of Alaska, from the initial immigration of the various native peoples over 10,000 years ago through the European settlement in the 20th century. This material is effectively presented and very interesting.
Earthquake Park is a site of major land subsidence during the 1964 Good Friday earthquake. An underlying layer of clay liquefied during the shaking, and the surface cracked into big blocks and sank, some of it below sea level. The resulting steep banks and jagged contours are still there, although somewhat smoothed by 36 years of erosion and disguised by a dense forest of young spruce and birch. A short path from a parking area to a bluff overlooking Cook Inlet has interpretive signs, intersected by an attractive paved bike trail which begins downtown and extends for several miles out to Point Woronzof. We got back to the park in time for happy hour with Anne and Dave.
This concludes our stay in the Anchorage and Kenai Peninsula area. There's much more to do, but we're running out of summer, and will head north to Fairbanks tomorrow.